The Artifact Read online

  “Pointing fingers will do no good,” Mohamed warned.

  “Now this newswoman has awakened the curiosity of her people!” Sadiq said.

  Mohamed stood up behind the table, chopping a hand through the air which carried the faint aroma of garlic and lamb from the hotplate on a corner table near his futon. “Enough. The time for excuse is past.” He moved across the shabby rug to confront his agents.

  “Their American Department of State claims satisfaction that no theft of artifacts from our desert occurred,” Amar said.

  “Do our diplomats believe the American politicians?” Sadiq asked.

  Mohamed folded his arms, his intent stare moving from one man to the other. “So now the burden is upon us.”

  Amar expressed his resentment. “There is little fairness in that.”

  Mohamed placed his polished wingtip on the edge of the low table, leaning a forearm on his knee, his face thrust forward until both men raised their eyes. “I can send you back to Fallujah, if you wish.”

  “No, no, Mohamed! Forgive the meaningless ranting of a frustrated believer.” Amar began rocking back and forth on his haunches, rubbing his hands together. “Tell us what we must do.”

  Mohamed began pacing the narrow room in which the only hint of his allegiance consisted of Saddam’s portrait on the stark wall behind his table, and a powerful shortwave radio receiver. “We still have no information regarding the theft than the Madigan woman has broadcast on their television. She must know more than she has told her audience.”

  Sadiq jumped to his feet. “We must take it from her!”

  “Not so quickly,” Mohamed said. “We do not know that she has enough knowledge to enable us to find the thieves and retrieve our treasure.”

  “How can we know that?” Amar asked.

  “By watching where she goes, what she does, who she talks to.” Mohamed answered.

  Sadiq grinned his comprehension. “Then we will pounce.”

  Mohamed stopped pacing and turned to face them, his countenance without expression. “Precisely.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Woodridge, IL

  October 2003

  At five-thirty the following morning she was drinking black coffee from a cardboard cup in the Ford Taurus rental she had parked diagonally across the street from a modest ranch home with a yellow lineman’s truck in the driveway. She lowered the front window on the passenger side to allow her cigarette smoke to escape into the unseasonably cold pre-dawn darkness, burrowing into her flannel-lined trench coat instead of drawing attention to her presence on the isolated suburban road by running the engine to generate warmth from the car heater. She held the cup between the knit gloves of both hands while reviewing the questions she had penned in her notebook during her flight from Georgia.

  The candidate for this first personal interview was a military policeman attached to Charlie Company who had been wounded and given a medical discharge shortly after returning to the States. Sammy had gleaned a few basic details on the man from government and private sources,

  indicating that Carr was a thirty-one year old self-employed electrical contractor. His wife worked

  at a local bank; and their two children attended the public school. The Carr residence was a modest ranch with a mortgage in small town of Woodridge, about fifteen miles south of O’Hare. In addition to his truck, they owned a three-year-old Dodge van and 1999 Pontiac sedan. Sammy could find no indication that Carr spent an extravagant amount of money or had secreted a fortune of any magnitude in any U.S. financial institution.

  Tucked in the corner of the Ford sedan, she felt a surge of adrenaline as a light came on in the Carr home, briefly aware that she had woken that morning without one of the dehydrating hangovers that had plagued her with increasing frequency during the past several months. Forty-five minutes later Bill Carr emerged from the side entrance of his home in blue overalls and climbed into the yellow truck parked in his driveway facing the street. The pickup had an enclosed rear bed with his name and trade painted on the panel. He sat in the cab for several minutes while the engine warmed, then the headlamps sliced through the gray half-light of civil dawn as the truck pulled out of the drive. Andrea started the Ford and followed.

  Carr’s destination was the construction site of a half-finished office building in a new industrial complex around which various pickup, trade and supplier vehicles were parked. A dozen or so workmen stood talking or moving toward a windowless, four-story building wrapped in heavy plastic sheeting against the elements. Andrea had not wanted to confront the man in the reassuring atmosphere of his own home with wife and children lingering in the next room, nor did she want to approach him on the job surrounded by fellow workers. She parked across from the site as Carr step out of the cab wearing a yellow hardhat and buckled a leather tool belt around his waist. The ex-paratrooper looked average in every way as far as Andrea could tell from that distance: height, weight, short dark hair. The only distinguishing characteristics she saw were a full beard closely trimmed and an economy of movement. Carr went around to the back of his truck, pulled a hefty

  toolbox from it, and walked toward the building.

  At mid-morning, the blaring horn of a catering truck pulled her from her reverie as it swung onto the packed, brown earth surrounding the construction site. Andrea slipped on a pair of dark glasses, pulled her beret down to her ears, grabbed her cane and walked toward the mobile canteen as workmen began laying down their tools. The driver in pink hardhat, green wool shirt and jeans propped up the shiny aluminum sides to reveal rows of sandwiches, pastries and drinks.

  Andrea made it to the coffee urn at the rear of the vehicle before many of the men had reached it. The catering proprietor was a plump, middle-aged woman with coarse features and blond hair swept under her hat. “Whatcha say, Honey?”

  “A large black and a Danish, if I can find a rest room.”

  The woman opened the spigot of the urn to fill a Styrofoam cup as she cocked her head toward a row of blue oblong boxes that looked like phone booths. “Help y’self to one of the Kan-Kans,” she said, “but pick one the lock ain’t broke and check for peepholes.”

  “Hey, Killjoy!” A rugged construction guy said to the laughter of several others.

  “You seen it enough, Franco,” the driver quipped, “whatta ya got, a bad memory?”

  More laughter and hoots rose from the crowd of men picking through the pastry section. Andrea laughed with them as she selected a chicken salad sandwich and Coke for lunch, collected her change and carried her brown bag back to the car. She would wait until after coffee break to use the Kan.

  The catering truck returned at noon, but most of the men had either purchased sandwiches at its earlier visit as she had or brought their lunch from home. William Carr was among the latter. When she saw him walking away from the building, Andrea stepped out of the Ford minus the hat and sunglasses and limped across the road to meet him at his truck. Carr paused with his hand on the door when he saw her approach.

  “Hi,” Andrea said, switching her cane to her left hand as she extended her right with an

  ingenuous smile. “Andrea Madigan, NNC News.”

  Carr shook her hand, nodding. “I know who you are Miss Madigan.”

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

  “I watched you with General Callaghan on the tube a couple of nights ago. Figured it might come to this.”

  Andrea passed the cane back to her right hand, running the fingers of her left through the gray band in her hair as she did. “Come to what?”

  “Chasing down guys in the Battalion. Looking for the phantom thieves.”

  “Phantom?”

  “You never been in the service, right, Miss Madigan?”

  “Call me Andy, please. No, Bill--may I call you that? I haven’t been in the army. But I’ve been around quite a few military operations in the past twenty years.”

  “Then maybe you know how bored it gets, ‘specially on front line miss
ions. Hurry up and wait, sit around and speculate.”

  “There’s a lot more to substantiate the Iraq theft than rumor.”

  Carr gave a little chuckle. “Guy finds a piece of colored cloth blowing on the sand, time word gets to the next squad it’s a gal’s skirt. When the platoon gets it, there’s a belly dancer roaming around the desert. The company hears it, there’s a whole harem out there abandoned by some sheik, whatever.”

  Andrea noticed several workers meandering across the construction project turn to look at them. “I have a sandwich in my car, will you eat your lunch with me so we can talk?”

  “Nothing to talk about, Miss Madigan. I know less about this Arab theft fantasy than the General told you.”

  “Lunch?”

  They sat in the front seat of the Ford eating their sandwiches. Andrea continued probing specific details, attempted to make him contradict himself or blurt out some significant kernel of enlightening information. But Carr remained calm, adamant in his denials and contention that the entire theft story was either an innocent fabrication or insidious hoax.

  “World War Two story goes,” Carr told her, “after frontline troops chased the Germans out of some town, they’d find a cartoon character painted on the wall of a building: ‘Kilroy was here’. Never found out who Kilroy was or how he got there first.”

  “People tell me your security was so tight,” Andrea said, “that any stolen contraband would be virtually impossible to smuggle back home.”

  “I’ll buy that. Some guys tried. I think we caught most.”

  Andrea’s expression was quizzical. “Most?”

  “Nobody could have squeezed a trunk full of treasure through, that’s for sure. Golden icons in their duffle, precious gems stuffed in pockets, whatever.”

  “How would you know?”

  “The brass doesn’t like to admit it, but we get the same kind of crime in the army as any other population. Theft, drugs, rape, murder once in awhile. So, there’s detectives trained to handle them just like any other police force. Go undercover, have a pretty good grapevine. Provost Marshal would have known if a bunch of grunts were hiding some billion-dollar booty in camp. Coming home we conduct spot baggage checks, suspicious duffels, bulging fatigue pockets, just like O’Hare.”

  “Do you know who supervised the Second Platoon Bravo boarding their transport home in June 2003?”

  “I took a piece of shrapnel in the leg from a roadside bomb going into Baghdad in May, so I wasn’t even in country.”

  “Who would know the names of MPs on that detail?”

  Carr gazed out the windshield frowning, as though he was watching a spectacular scenario running through his mind like some distasteful film in a movie theater. “I understand the Battalion disembarked from Balad Airbase, about seventy klicks north of Baghdad, a twenty-five kilometer

  square site completely enclosed by security fence.”

  “I didn’t get there,” Andy said. “It must be huge.”

  “It’s one of the biggest and busiest airports in the country with about 20,000 air force and army personnel, Yugo hangars, barracks, two 11,000-foot runways that launch everything from F-16’s, couple of hundred helicopters, C-5 Galaxy transports. Handles five times the passengers as Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, plus cargo.”

  “Sounds like a lot of confusion the thieves could easily sneak a treasure through.”

  “Think you could get contraband through security at LaGuardia?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “MP details are ten times better than those contract airport security guards.” He swirled the remnants in his can of Pepsi, staring at it. “MP’s nose around a lot, we have our pigeons just like city cops, so I’m pretty damn sure we’d know if any of us heard even a peep about some stolen treasure. You can’t keep something like that quiet in the army, Ma’am. No way.”

  “Suppose some MP was in on the scam?”

  Carr’s reply was surprisingly phlegmatic. “Guess you can’t rule that out.”

  “First, I’d have to find the MPs that supervised the departure of Lieutenant Mitchell’s 2nd Platoon Bravo.”

  Carr hesitated, staring more intently into his drink as he continued swirling its contents.

  “Second Platoon. They took a few more hits than the rest of them. Ran into a nest of jihads

  in some Syrian, Jordan border town.”

  Andrea perked up. “Not in Fallujah?”

  “That’s what I heard.” She waited for him to continue. “Like I said, we were real tight on makin’ sure nothin’ was smuggled home.” He drained his drink and packed up the debris from his lunch.

  “If you were in my shoes, Bill, trying to confirm or dismiss this theft allegation, what would you do?”

  “Stumbling on a buried treasure is against the odds, but possible,” he said. “How’re you ever gonna’ prove that?” Carr seemed like an intelligent man, intrigued by the challenge of her question. “All scuttlebutt eventually gets to the Top. Concentrate on him, if you want to keep wasting your time.”

  “General Callaghan?”

  “Master Sergeant Stubbs, Callaghan’s Sergeant Major, Bravo HQ Company.”

  Attired in a black shantung sport coat, white Oxford button-down, tan trousers and black kiltie loafers, Eddie DiBiasio walked into the Federal Hill coffee shop known to the local cognoscenti as “Il Caffé.” He nodded to the man wearing a white apron and baker’s cap behind the glass counter filled with brioche, crème stuffed Cannoli and other ethnic pastries as he strolled confidently toward the rear of the narrow room to stand in silence beside a booth upholstered in maroon vinyl in which a fat man of middle age and receding hairline sat reading The Providence Journal.

  The fat man had not looked up from his newspaper when the customer bell above the entrance door had tingled the young man’s arrival, but knew that the movement of the heavy curtain on the egress from the back room meant that the person who entered had been observed and recognized by at least one pair of constantly suspicious eyes. Nor did the seated man glance up from the columns of newsprint he continued to scan through a pair of half-lens reading glasses when he spoke in his casual Sicilian dialect.

  “What brings my favorite nephew out so early to expose that precious automobile to the perils of Rhode Island commuters?”

  “The news about the Iraqi treasure, Uncle Vinnie,” Eddie answered in the same language. Although the customers of the small bakery were almost universally Italian, few ventured closer than ten feet from the corner booth in the rear of the shop without express invitation.

  Vincent Tomassi closed the paper, folded and placed it on the bench beside him, then buttoned his double-breasted blue blazer that covered the polo shirt of saffron yellow stretched over his broad expanse of stomach. “Sit down, Eduardo,” he commanded.

  Eddie interpreted the invitation as interest on the part of his uncle, or at least permission to proceed. “It has to be worth millions. According to the woman reporter, a bunch of army stupido has been sitting on it for months. We ought to be able to scoop it up and fence it off for practically full value.”

  “Stupido, you think.”

  “They can’t be that smart if they haven’t figured out how to unload it yet.”

  “Smart enough to bring it in,” Vincent observed, “and keep it secret for over a year.”

  “What good does that do?” Eddie asked. “I’d have sold it to private collectors right off, while nobody knew about it.”

  “You know who they are, these private collectors?”

  “They wouldn’t be hard to find.”

  The fleshy face and closely shaved cheeks of Vincent Tomassi were placid, his tone of voice thoughtful, as though considering this proposal for the first time.

  “Place a value on the objects, negotiate the sale without alerting the authorities?”

  “You are more knowledgeable than me about our resources, Uncle Vinnie.”

  “How would you find this secret treasure?”

  “The Madigan reporter k
nows more than she’s telling,” Eddie said.

  “Kidnap? A federal offense. What if she cannot lead you to the treasure? If it doesn’t exist, like the army says?”

  Eddie suddenly realized he was on the defensive regarding his brainstorm carefully developed over the past week, his enthusiasm for it beginning to dwindle before the calm interrogation of his mother’s older brother. “There’s a risk, sure. But the payoff on this one quick hit could bring in as much pure profit as we see in a year.”

  “The risk,” said the fat man, ignoring Eddie’s speculation. “Abducting a reporter, disposing of the woman whether or not she can help you.”

  Eddie stroked the long black brilliantine hair combed back from his forehead, careful not to disturb the well-defined center part. “Maybe I jumped too fast,” he said in English.

  His uncle nodded, also switching to English. “College boy. They teach you to think up there on that other hill or just memorize dates, recite poetry?”

  “I was just trying to....”

  The fat man waved a hand at the pastry counter. “Half-baked ideas are just as bad as a half-baked lasagna. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand, Uncle Vinnie.”

  The fat man smiled at his nephew, switching back to Italian. “We must watch this woman until we are sure she can lead us to the treasure. Remain alert to Iraqi agents and others who will join the imbroglio.”

  Eddie slapped a palm lightly against his forehead. “I should have guessed, Uncle Vinnie.”

  Eddie had the good sense to remain silent when Vincent Tomassi turned toward the glass pastry case, barely lifting his hand with two raised fingers. The counterman immediately began drawing espresso from a silver urn into tiny cups.

  “You have a good Sicilian brain, Eduardo. Despite the confusion of your college learning.”